One of the major recent advancements in the PHP ecosystem has been the use of Composer (and the Packagist service) for package and dependency management. Unfortunately, this default setup comes with one big limitation - if the Packagist or Github are unavailable for some reason, your Composer install will fail, possibly leaving you dead in the water. So, what can you do to help? On the Qandidate.com blog today they introduce you to Satis and how to integrate it into your deployment process.

If you're familiar with Composer you know it can be slow and sometimes unreliable when one or more packages are not available. Every time you run composer update Composer will access Packagist to check for new versions of the packages you use. When it finds new releases it will access GitHub, BitBucket (or wherever the packages are hosted) to download your packages.

Satis is a "private Packagist" and provides the data Composer needs to fetch and integrate either your internal packages or mirrors of external ones you've created. They help you get it installed, configured and show how to build and serve up the information via PHP's own built-in web server. They also touch on a few other related points - the speed of Satis, reliability and some concerns around securing your installation.